Experts who demonise happy pills do not know what they are talking about

I was first prescribed antidepressants when I was 17. I know, I know – so young! But did I really need them? Aren’t all teenagers depressed? Isn’t it their modus operandi to sit at home all day, moping, with a face like a slapped behind, communicating only in grunts and snorts? I’m not even sure doctors can prescribe antidepressants to a 17-year-old nowadays, without being carted off to court and put on trial for infringing their human rights, or some such.

Anyway, there I was, the picture of teenage misery, refusing to leave the house for a whole week, communicating only through the medium of tears, washing my hands until they bled, muttering continuously to myself under my breath, and eventually my mother thought: “Hmm, there’s something not quite right here.”

So she took me to the doctor. I remember sitting in the waiting room, talking to myself. I was saying: “My family will not die, my family will not die, my family WILL. NOT. DIE.”

But even though I was talking to myself and everyone was looking at me as if I were bonkers, I still had a sense of relief that finally someone might work out what was wrong with me. The doctor said I probably had severe obsessive compulsive disorder and clinical depression, before telling my mum to bring me back in three weeks if I still felt bad. Ye gads, I was not sure I could get through the next three minutes, let alone the next three weeks, without driving mad both myself and every member of my family (who would not die, would not die, WOULD. NOT. DIE).

To cut a long and tear-stained story short, my mum frogmarched me back to the GP, who put me on antidepressants. I have been on them – and very happily, more or less – ever since. I do get miserable sometimes, but it’s usually only when I read, as I have this week, another bit of research from the anti-antidepressant crowd.

Prof Peter Gøtzsche, who spends his life trying to expose medical myths – he also thinks that we shouldn’t screen women over 50 for breast cancer – yesterday launched the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry (CEP). Its first task? To tell the world that antidepressants do more harm than good.

Prof Gøtzsche has found that they are being prescribed to people who are only “mildly depressed” (is being mildly depressed a bit like being slightly pregnant?) and that they are handed out for matters as trivial as exam stress, marital breakdown and post-flu fatigue. Then they become hooked on them. Furthermore, many people taking antidepressants discover that – boo hoo – their sex drives disappear. In most cases, say the people at the CEP, people with depression will feel better “with the passing of time”.

I always suspect that the anti-antidepressant crowd have never actually been depressed themselves; that perhaps they don’t even really believe in the concept of depression at all. Because anyone with even a passing knowledge of mental illness knows that time does not pass when you are depressed, at least not in the normal way. A minute feels like an hour, an hour like a day.

When you go to the doctor and they offer you the option of a) antidepressants, which may or may not work right this minute, or b) cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but only when you get to the end of an NHS waiting list in six months, the preferred option is obvious.

That is the first mistake that Prof Gøtzsche makes when he demonises antidepressants: for doctors labouring under cuts to mental health budgets, they are often the only answer they have.

The second mistake is to use those who have been wrongly prescribed “happy pills” as a stick to beat patients who haven’t. If someone with nothing more than exam stress is stuck on Prozac, I don’t think that’s the fault of “evil” drug companies. It is merely the result of bad medical practice. As is the fact that people are said to be “hooked”. Antidepressant withdrawal is a real doozy of an experience – brain zaps, dizziness, nausea, extreme fatigue – but it can be managed with the help of a doctor. The problem is, most GPs don’t have the time or resources to keep tabs on patients who take antidepressants, and they very rarely bother to encourage anyone to go for CBT sessions once a vacancy eventually comes up.

Then there’s the matter of libido. Prof Gøtzsche is right when he says that antidepressants put you at risk of sexual problems, but believe me: when you are in the darkest depths of despair, you will happily trade in the ability to orgasm for a ticket out of the bleakness.

But the drugs don’t actually work as they are supposed to, you say! And yet three quarters of people on antidepressants claim that they have improved their lives. That’s an astonishing number.

So I am sick of the professionally happy telling us that antidepressants are merely placebos – that we are being drugged by Big Pharma, and that sitting down for a good chat would do us just as much good. This may be so. But the professionally happy are rarely available at short notice to the genuinely depressed – not unless the genuinely depressed happen also to be incredibly rich.

For the record, a mixture of both CBT and Sertraline has seen me right. It was the Sertraline, one of the most commonly prescribed antidepressants, that provided me with the foundation for recovery, which got me through until therapy was available.

Seen in that light, do antidepressants do more harm than good? Or do the people warning that they do more harm than good actually do more harm than good? Do they frighten already vulnerable people who are short of options and even shorter on patience?

Antidepressants may not be a magic cure-all, but they offer hope to many of us. And the other option – simply doing nothing – is a far harder pill to swallow.

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EENY, MEENY, MINY, WEDDING DRESS...

Bryony Gordon married Harry in a £90 frock from Monsoon (Andrew Crowley)

I’m quite excited about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new blockbuster exhibition of wedding dresses, if only because I never managed to muster any enthusiasm for my own. I have long been amazed by a woman’s ability to spend several months’ wages on something she will only ever wear once (if she’s lucky).

My frock cost me £90 and took about five minutes to choose. You can probably tell just by looking at it. What happened was this: I went with my sister and my (then) three-month-old baby to Monsoon, the high street store, because the idea of going to a specialist bridal shop with a mewling infant filled me with horror. But also because once you’ve gone to the trouble of having a child out of wedlock, a big fussy wedding is about as low on your list of priorities as, say, skydiving and tequila.

“Do you like this one?” I asked my sister, who was bouncing her screaming niece up and down on her hip.

“Yeah, fine,” she sighed.

“And this one?”

“It’s perfectly OK,” she said, wiping baby sick off her new Topshop jumper.

“And what about this?” I ventured, desperately hoping that we might capture some of that supposed magic everyone talks about when they first try on their wedding dress.

“WAHHHHHHH HHHHH,” said my daughter.

My frock was chosen over a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

Later, I told my sister that I had expected everyone to cry at the sight of me in my gown, much as they do in programmes like Don’t Tell the Bride. “It’s OK,” she said. “At least your daughter did.”

On the wedding day itself, I had changed into an old party dress by 5pm – and it was none the worse for it.

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ST GEORGE OF BEVERLY HILLS HAS LOST HIS HALO

Clooney with Amal Alamuddin (Rex)

Did George Clooney decide this was a good week to bury bad news? Amid the hysteria about his engagement to his 36-year-old British girlfriend Amal Alamuddin, it has been quite overlooked that the actor has quit as a UN Messenger of Peace.

Were we aware that such a thing existed at all? Are UN Messengers of Peace a kind of contemporary celestial being? Is Gorgeous George a modern-day Gabriel? But seriously. According to the UN website, its Messengers are “prominent personalities” who volunteer their “time, talent and passion to raise awareness of United Nations efforts to improve the lives of billions of people everywhere”. But after six years, “Mr Clooney feels it is time to retire his official role”, a spokesman said. And how will the children of Darfur survive without Clooney, who, lest we forget, is not an actual doctor, just a bloke who was paid to play one in ER.

Why do we venerate the man as if he were a saint? The way some go on, it’s a surprise he wasn’t at the Vatican getting canonised with Popes John Paul II and John XXIII. St George of Beverly Hills would look fab on the opening credits. But all he’s done is break a thousand hearts; Tina Fey described Gravity as “a story about how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age”.

Oh, and travel to Africa, where, according to experts, he has ended up distorting complex issues and actually making it harder to find a solution to the situation in Sudan. So why do we consider Ms Alamuddin the lucky one? She’s an experienced human rights lawyer, a beautiful Oxford graduate who is an actual adviser to the UN. Clooney is the one who should be thanking his lucky stars, not his bride-to-be.